Panasonic has revealed it will produce a 145in plasma screen with a resolution of 7680 x 4320, the world's first 8k display not to require a backlight, apparently.
The Super Hi-Vision project - detailed on the Panasonic press site, but hidden behind a password to keep the great unwashed and bloggers out, and let real journos in …

And I'll hear your TV a block away...

@wwwwoooooowwwwwwww...me want!

In other news...

Footballers, F1 Drivers, et.al. lose money 'cos it's better to sit in a big pub, than paying £100, enduring the rain, or watch it on a fuc*king humungously big screen. Plus, you CAN drink while the footie's on.....

Re: At last!

When screens were small a lot of that detail that was, shall we say aethestically challenged famous faces, masked by low-def quality. The screen gets bigger and the def gets higher and the last thing I need to see is a 3 inch high representation of Simon Cowell's flipping nose hair in my living room when the Missus insists on watching some mindless X-factor style pap!

Oh....

Let me guess...

9000000 inches....yawn

....whatever.

Are people REALLY this empty inside that the prospect of the same bullshit, but BIGGER, really excites them?

Last year I was quite excited, briefly, about the prospect of upgrading my 32" LCD to a 100 inch, £2500 Pioneer... which looked great and all that, but then I mulled it over and realised. It's an illusion. Once I've got it at home, it'll just be the same old same old, I won't watch fuck all on it, because almost everything on TV is absolute crap. As for films, well once I've seen them, I've seen them, that's it. I'll almost never watch them again, and genuinely great films are truly few and far between. Most truly great films also do not need to compensate by being big and flashy and loud. They are equally great at any scale. It's only crappy generic mainstream films which so desperately need to compensate for their lack of substance by being big and flashy and loud.

300 is laughable crap on a 17" screen, and being on a 300" screen doesn't help. Unless you are easily impressed by, erm, big pictures.

Rant done. Maybe I'm just too old. I just don't care about how big a sodding screen is anymore.

Get back to me when we can cast a true 3D holo up in the middle of a room, and I'll be genuinel excited, as it will be a fundamental piece of progress in that arena. All this incremental money grabbing stuff is dull.

Re: 9000000 inches....yawn

"Most truly great films also do not need to compensate by being big and flashy and loud. They are equally great at any scale."

It has nothing to do with being flashy and loud, it has to do with immersion and with seeing the film as the director intended.

How can you expect to be really involved in Citizen Kane if your view is 20% movie and 80% lamp, couch, painting on the wall, cat, floor with a bunch of crap on it, some wires, etc? How can you expect to see with a 20 degree FOV the detail the director intended you to see with a 60 degree FOV?

Then there's color quality and dynamic range - trust me, this makes a huge difference. If you've got some POS 32" TV, chances are that black and white movies are actually blue and purple and red and gray and purple and red and blue movies. Chances are that you can't see the two main characters' silhouettes lurking through the shadows because the silhouettes get rendered the same color as the shadows.

And you say you don't need 'loud' - well, what's loud? You need high quality, 'loud' audio to have the correct dynamic range between a door slamming and a whisper. You don't have to have Michael Bay style firefights to justify - to require - an excellent sound system with 90+db of dynamic range. The ability to hear a yelling match at the same quality and *understandability* as a passionate whisper is essential to those truly great films, and crappy hardware will *not* reproduce it effectively.

Now, you don't need to go out and spend $10,000 on a home theater, but you -do- need to acknowledge that, just as there's more to film than big explosions, there's more to high quality portrayal of film than big explosions.

Look at it this way: The great directors of our time did not spend tens of thousands of hours choosing their shots and angles so that you could see them in a postage stamp window. The best cinematographers did not learn the intricacies of bringing the right color and shade to the screen so you could fail to see half of it on some POS Westinghouse LCD with a 2:1 contrast ratio. The best audio engineers and musicians didn't hone their crafts and extract their every last bit of skill and ability so people could listen on a couple of two-inch TV speakers with the frequency range of an iPad.

For someone who's so self-righteous about quality film and crappy generic mainstream, you seem to know remarkably little about how film actually works. See some of those truly great films the way they were meant to be seen. You might end up wanting to see some of them again, too.

Re: 9000000 inches....yawn

I Take some of your points, and yes, to a certain point I am playing devils advocate, but in all honesty I'm really not the least bit interested in the nuances and subtleties, most of which are barely perceptible. If it's a great story well acted, it's a great story well acted, and you find yourself immersed, to the extent that the cat and the carpet and wall behind

To be honest I was never very good at the doing the whole temporary suspension of disbelief thing.... so most film that I watch tends to be documentary. I can't stand most fiction, I find it trite and dull. Recently I enjoyed City of God, but again, it was on a 30" LCD. I have seen it on an HD LED Samsung. It's the same film, but bigger.

I think the engineers and cameramen and so on honed their skills so that they could earn more money in the industry. I don't think most of them could care less about the end viewers experience, beyond how it reflects upon their skillset.

Taking it to the extreme, reading a book is a great deal richer and more immersive than ANY film based story, and most books are TINY. That said they have excellent resolution and image stability. ;)

Horses for courses, I suppose. Each to their own. I was really excited as I said, and yet two years later I don't feel I have missed anything by not spending 5000 on a new `home cinema` setup. But I am 5000 better off, when all my friends are moaning about not having any money and how tough things are getting. Still, they have their massive TVs to console themselves with ;)

Premature

They still haven't got their 2012 models in the shops yet (due "Apil") so all this marketing is, well, just marketing.

All these TV companies need to FOCUS. Good products, made reliably (look at the dire light bleed problems on Samsung's 2011 and 2012 LED sets) that can be upgraded for at least 3 years. No point in Panasonic or Sony refusing to update 2011 model software - it'll put punters off.

Re: Premature

Many of these [insert your superlative] products are about as 'real' as the concept cars you see at motor shows. There's no rush to ever get them to market. They get attention at trade shows and free advertising in the papers.

I mean ... not The Register obviously. They wouldn't be gullible enough to splash the word PANASONIC onto their interweb just because somebody at PANASONIC released the sniff of a hint of a rumour that a big and shiny PANASONIC product might possibly go on sale at some vague point in the future. Maybe. Perhaps.

Re: Premature

How would you prefer they refer to Panasonic, then? 'COMPANY'? 'Above-mentioned commercial organization'? 'The Company Which Must Not Be Named'? 'Eddie'? 'Anonymous Coward'?

An 8k by 4k 140-odd-inch screen is interesting just for the sake of its existence. Even if it were on sale, few of us would be going out to get one, so why does it matter whether it's available this instant? And are you - or are most Reg readers - so suggestible that we're now going to reflexively go out and but some other above-mentioned commercial organization product without knowing why?

Re: Makes sense for that resolution

'Still rare'? I'm not sure I've found any way to get any 4k content anywhere, short of buying yourself a RED camera and making it on your own. Are there ways to get any 'real' content (non-demo) at > 1080p resolution at all?

Re: Makes sense for that resolution

Canon have recently announced some stuff that can shoot at 4K (although not 8K). I don't believe they're shipping, but it's relatively consumer-spec stuff.

Seems a little unwieldy - the last screen of this resolution that I used was 44" diagonal (plus some bezels) - but I'll take the pixels where I can get them.

What does the resolution have to do with plasmas flickering? Pretty much every plasma screen I've ever seen flickers visibly to me (which is why I don't own one). Kudos to Panasonic if they've got the flicker fixed, though.